The Origin of “Mayday”

“Mayday” is an emergency procedure word used internationally as a distress signal in voice-procedure radio communications.  It is used to signal a life-threatening emergency, primarily by aviators and mariners.  In some countries, firefighters, police forces, and transport organisations also use the term.  Convention requires the word be repeated three times in a row during the initial emergency declaration: “Mayday, mayday, mayday”.  This is to prevent it being mistaken for some similar-sounding phrase under noisy conditions, and to distinguish an actual mayday call from a message about a mayday call. 

It is a French word, meaning, “help me”.  In English, we spell it the way it sounds, but the French spelling is “m’aider” but it is pronounced the same. 

The mayday procedure word was conceived, by Frederick Stanley Mockford, as a distress call in the early 1920s.  He was the officer-in-charge of radio, at Croydon Airport, England.  He had been asked to think of a word that would indicate distress and would easily be understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency.  Since much of the air traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, he proposed the term “mayday”, the phonetic equivalent of the French “m’aidez”, “help me”, or “m’aider” which is a short form of “venez m’aider”, “come help me”.  The new procedure word was introduced for cross-Channel flights in February 1923.